First published in 1952, the New Musical Express or NME, has always based its success around being the champion of new and emerging rock music. It was the first organisation to publish a British singles chart some 54 years ago and since 1953 has organised regular awards and poll winners concerts across the UK with the aim of promoting tomorrows big stars in front of an ever demanding audience.
This spring's New Music Awards Tour, consisted of 4 bands per night playing 13 venues over 18 nights. The headline act were the London based quartet Boy Kill Boy; described by NME recently as 'like The Smiths splitting half a disco biscuit with Hard-Fi in the Hacienda gents'. Amidst the frenzy on stage for much of this new band tour was monitor engineer Stan Saunders, sporting not only a new haircut but the equally new and trendy Yamaha M7CL mixing console.
"I first encountered the M7CL when Mags (Magaly Couturier) was doing monitors on the recent Gary Numan tour. She is very happy with it and I felt it was about time I got my head around digital mixers. My spec sheet normally has NO digital in big letters but with times moving so fast, I knew we might get left behind."
Stageaudio Services, based in Stourbridge, provided the sound system for most of the tour venues except those with in-house facilities. At FOH, a Midas Heritage was accompanied by the usual van load of outboard and graphics. With all bands sharing the same FOH desk, careful digital camera work was employed to record the mic pre and EQ settings. In contrast, the M7CL provided an all in one solution that sat comfortably in a typically diminutive stage left. We asked Stan how was coping on his foray into the mysterious world of digital audio.
"I had a few minutes run through at LMC in Birmingham who provided the M7CL, went back to the warehouse and took just 30 minutes to set it up for the tour. It was a case of click bang, job done. We had a guest monitor engineer at each of the shows and he was up and running in just 10 minutes. There's a couple of things I'd like to see changed and I'm hoping the guys in Japan will include them in the future but on the whole, I've found the desk very straight forward to use. Being able to store each band's mix on a show like this has proved very useful with so little time to swap over in the middle."
Another experienced engineer happy to endorse the popular saying; if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
